Putin Declares War on Orphans, NGOs and the U.S.

Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- On New Year’s Day, a law took effect
in Russia banning U.S. families from adopting children there.
Not only is this use of orphans to score a political point
repugnant, it also reflects a worrying defensive and
isolationist trend in President Vladimir Putin’s foreign and
domestic policies.

The adoption ban was rushed through Russia’s parliament in
obvious retaliation for a new U.S. law denying visas to and
freezing assets of officials involved in the unpunished
jailhouse death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption
lawyer who represented a U.S. hedge fund.

The new law does nothing to hurt the U.S. officials at whom
it was directed, while denying a better life to Russian orphans,
who are statistically more likely to survive and thrive in the
U.S.

In addition, the adoption law is less of an isolated tit-for-tat with the U.S. than it seems. The decision reflects a
wider attempt by Russia’s political leaders to batten the
hatches against foreign political influence, international
cooperation and civil society within Russia. This penchant can
also be seen in Russian efforts to block precedents that
legitimize cross-border humanitarian intervention anywhere on
the globe.

Such policies, with their insistence on sovereignty and
noninterference, will be familiar to any student of the former
Soviet Union. While they are rational for Putin in terms of
protecting the political system he has created since coming to
power in 2000, they bode ill for Russia in the longer term.

Potemkin Democracy

Pro-democracy nongovernmental groups, by definition, are
hostile to Putin’s Potemkin democracy. Similarly, the Kremlin
regime worries that a robust “responsibility to protect”
principle to support internationally sanctioned military
intervention against governments that abuse their populations
might one day be used against Russia, or, more plausibly, its
ex-Soviet neighbors such as Belarus, Uzbekistan or Ukraine.

Through the back-to-the-USSR policies of repression and
isolation, Putin has neutralized domestic political opposition
and blocked United Nations Security Council action on Syria. But
as with the adoption law, the victims of which are Russian,
these policies will probably prove self-destructive.

Take the conflict in Syria, where Russia has prevented any
internationally sanctioned effort to intervene. That isn’t
because Russia hopes to defend its particular interests in Syria
-- it knows those, and the regime of Bashar al-Assad, are lost.

Russia’s priorities are: First, to ensure that a Libya-style military intervention against established dictatorships
does not receive further precedent; second, to ensure that even
if Russia loses influence in the Middle East, the U.S. loses
more.

Russia, as Syria’s only world-power ally, could help forge
an end to the conflict. Doing so would give it a seat at the
table in shaping Syria’s future, reduce turmoil in the Middle
East (where jihadism poses a real threat to Russia), and appease
Russia’s substantial Sunni Muslim minority. Yet Putin and
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov prefer to stick by a crumbling
status quo.

Lavrov could also help engineer the end of the
international standoff over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons
program, which Russia has a strong interest in stopping. He
could even help negotiate a package deal with Iran and Syria.
Yet such efforts are unlikely so long as Putin is focused on
solidifying iron rule and defying the U.S.

Conservative Base

Domestic examples of Russia’s defensiveness can be seen in
the decisions to boot the U.S. Agency for International
Development out of the country and to clamp down on foreign-financed nongovernment organizations. Russia’s burgeoning middle
class and liberals may object, but in his second period as
president, Putin’s power base centers on conservative,
nationalist rural voters and the Russian Orthodox Church.

That’s a large base -- and like Putin himself, the adoption
law is fairly popular, supported by 56 percent of people polled
in December. Many Russians see foreign adoptions of Russian
children as a sign of weakness.

In the same way, the decision to prosecute members of the
Pussy Riot punk performance group last year, for lip-syncing an
anti-Putin song in an Orthodox cathedral, earned worldwide
ridicule but pleased conservatives and the church.

Putin has tried to separate this political isolationism
from the economy, where he understands that Russia must
increasingly engage with the world. The country, for example,
finally joined the World Trade Organization last year. But
economics and politics can be hard to keep separate.

Hence the recent deterioration in relations between Putin
and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany was long
Russia’s lead advocate within the European Union, which is the
Russian petrostate’s most important export market for natural
gas. Yet Putin has clashed publicly with Merkel over human
rights during the past year, including over Pussy Riot.

With Germany no longer playing defense for Russia, the
European Commission in September began an antitrust
investigation into alleged monopolistic behavior by Russia’s gas
giant, Gazprom OAO, in eight of the EU’s eastern European
markets. That could hurt.

Putin and his regime appear to be haunted by the experience
of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, or openness policies, which in
their view led to the breakup of the Soviet empire. Putin is
determined not to repeat the error.

Yet Gorbachev was responding to years of missteps that made
an increasingly isolated Soviet Union too weak to survive.
Exactly the sorts of mistakes Putin is repeating now.